This paper aims at understanding the practices of Clinical Psychology towards psychological suffering caused by contemporary unemployment. To this end, eight psychologists from Porto Alegre outskirts were interviewed. They were asked about their understanding of issues regarding work and unemployment and consequences to patients' subjectivity, intervention practices they used and the relationship of these interventions to theories and possible contributions of psychology towards the phenomenon under scrutiny. Content analysis was used to study the data collected during the interviews.Psychologists' utterances have been divided in four groups based on the following categories: work, unemployment, interventions towards unemployment and psychology's contributions to unemployment. The author concludes that clinical psychology needs to prepare professionals who are able to deal, in their clinical practices, with ever emerging contemporary phenomena such as unemployment. It is also highlighted that more investigations on this area of study are necessary.
Unemployment; clinical psychology; mental health